Thursday

Sep 5, 2019 at 6:01 AM

Otterbein University's incoming class has grown by 22% over last year, and that’s no accident, school officials say.

The private Westerville university welcomed an incoming class of 720 students to campus as classes began last week. The last time that Otterbein had a class that size was 2016, said Jefferson Blackburn-Smith, Otterbein’s vice president for enrollment management. Last year's incoming class had about 590 students.

School officials point to a number of recent programs for attracting students to Otterbein, including its new Opportunity Scholarship. Announced last fall, the scholarship covers any remaining tuition costs for low- and moderate-income Ohio students after federal and state aid, grants and other scholarships have been applied.

They credit the Opportunity Scholarship program for helping to drive an overall 18% increase this year in Otterbein students who are eligible for the federal Pell Grant. About 34% of the incoming class, or 242 students, fit that description, and nearly 170 of them received the Opportunity Scholarship.

“We think it was very important,” Blackburn-Smith said of the scholarship program. “It drove applications and it drove enrollment, and we’re excited about that.”

Since it was first offered last school year, the program has applied to in-state students who are eligible for the federal Pell Grant. This school year, Otterbein has tweaked the program to also include students whose families earn $60,000 a year or less.

“We want people to see that number and see, “Oh, we will qualify for that,’” Blackburn-Smith said. “We’re very excited about year two of the program and what we can do with it.”

Otterbein also is seeing impact from its existing Urban Districts Initiative, which it started in 2014 by increasing need-based aid for students from Columbus City Schools. The program was then expanded over the next few years to include Cristo Rey High School and Southwest, Westerville and Whitehall city schools.

More than 110 students, or about 17%, of Otterbein’s incoming fall class come from those districts. That includes 44 first-year students from Columbus City Schools, the largest-ever entering class from the state's largest district, Otterbein officials said.

Abigail Wilson, 18, of Columbus' Eastmoor neighborhood, is one of those students.

A first-generation college student, Wilson said she’s always considered her family to be of modest means.

“I never imagined myself at a private school,” she said.

Yet here she is, beginning her freshman year at Otterbein, studying psychology with hopes to pursue psychiatric social work.

“The cost of college freaked me out, because I knew if I didn’t keep my grades up ... I wouldn’t be able to afford college, I wouldn't be able to go,” she said.

Attending Otterbein is “a huge step for our family,” she said.

About 75 of the new entering students are coming to Otterbein after taking advantage of the transfer partnership that the school shares with Columbus State Community College.

Aimed at lower-income and minority students, these programs have helped diversify and enrich Otterbein’s campus, Blackburn-Smith said, noting that the school’s student body now has about 23% students of color, up from 12% in 2012.

They are students who take on leadership roles, join student organizations, participate on athletic teams and with arts programs, he said.

"They've really helped us live our values better, because they challenged us on some of the issues related to inequality in higher education," Blackburn-Smith said. He pointed to a new food cooperative for food-insecure students as an example of a need that administrators didn't see before students pointed it out.

“(More minority students) really moved our conversation on campus to the idea of diversity, to the idea of inclusion, and we’re better for it,” he said.

jsmola@dispatch.com

@jennsmola

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